Agriculture and Rural Development

Dots on the world map – they are coral atolls and volcanic islands spread across a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean with names as exotic as their turquoise water, white sand and tropical foliage.
Twelve Pacific Island countries are members of the World Bank. Between them they are home to about 11 million people, much less than one percent of the global population.

One of them, Kiribati, consists of 33 atolls and coral islets, spread across an area larger than India, but with a land mass smaller than New Delhi. With less than 10,000 inhabitants, Tuvalu is the World Bank’s smallest member country.
Despite such remote and tiny landscapes, the Pacific Island countries – including Fiji, Palau, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia and Timor-Leste – represent far more than meets the eye.

There are many kinds of rice and one of the most popular varieties in Myanmar is called Emata. This word literally means that it’s so delicious that a visitor is still sitting and eating. Emata lives up to its name- people in Myanmar love it for its long grain, fluffy and slightly sticky texture after cooking. This rice variety is also one of their main exports.

People find it troubling that the price of Emata has risen by more than 40% over the last five years. The price of rice has also been fluctuating sharper than in neighboring Thailand, Vietnam or Cambodia. Since Myanmar’s domestic rice market is weakly integrated into global markets, domestic factors are the primary reason behind high price fluctuations.

I met a young rice farmer during my recent trip to Myanmar. He has a tiny plot of land on the outskirts of the irrigation system and could harvest only one rice crop a year. Even if he worked hard, and the weather was at its best, he produced only enough rice to feed his family for 10 months. During the last two months of the rice-growing season, he would walk around his village, a small plastic cup in his hands, and ask neighbors if he could borrow some rice. This would happen year after year.

Unfortunately, this story is not uncommon. A majority of Myanmar’s laborers work in agriculture. A third of them live below the poverty line and depend on rice for survival.

There is clear and present danger that another global food price crisis will emerge sooner than later.

A key signal is the lackluster result of the December 2013 Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Bali, Indonesia - in the heart of the ASEAN community.

The compromises arising from the WTO Bali meeting further demonstrates that many WTO member-nations have returned to a focus on internal domestic politics, sacrificing long-term gains shared across nations, in favor of short-term gains motivated largely by domestic political survival or sheer short-sightedness.

Video Blog: World Bank Vice President for East Asia & Pacific on his Visit to Chin State, Myanmar

Axel van Trotsenburg, World Bank Vice President for East Asia & the Pacific, visited Myanmar from May 12-16 to observe some of the initial results of the National Community Driven Development Project, the World Bank’s first project in the country in 25 years.

Through the initiative, several NGOs, co-ops and businesses in coffee and cocoa are all helping deliver vital services to thousands of small farmers – such as training, planting materials, access to demonstration sites and certification schemes, as well as social services like gender, HIV/ AIDS awareness.

The idea is that such support will allow growers to produce more and better quality produce and see higher incomes, with benefits passing to families and communities, while also providing a significant and much-needed boost to the coffee and cocoa industries.

Taking development to the outlying provinces of Solomon Islands is not an easy ride. I found this out when going on a site visit to the Rural Development Program (RDP) at the country’s far western province of Choiseul.

At the Northwest region of Choiseul province where the island faces open waters that span to the Micronesian archipelago of the Pacific lies a village called Polo. The Polo community has a primary school that was established in 1957 when Solomon Islands was still a British Protectorate, prior to independence in 1978. Since its inception, the Polo school never had a permanent classroom building until two years ago when through the RDP participatory process, the community identified the school as their main need.

Higher prices have been making headlines in Thailand. Although wages and farm incomes are up, so are the prices of eggs, milk and fried rice. I am definitely feeling the pinch: the price of my favorite beverage—coconut water—has surged following a beetle infestation.

As prices go up, so does the pressure on the government to reign in the spiraling cost of living. But as we discussed in the recently released Thailand Economic Monitor - April 2011, the current inflation challenge is especially tough to tackle.